ProtonDB is great, but the signal-to-noise ratio is killing me. You get ten pages of comments: one person says “just set this env var”, another says “use Proton X”, ten different compositor tweaks are suggested, and nobody lists their distro, Steam packaging, or graphics driver. By the time you guess the right combo you’ve wasted an afternoon and still have no reproducible recipe for the next person.

Idea: a community-run repo of tiny, opinionated “Game Launch Recipes”. Each recipe is a single YAML file with a minimal set of fields: steam_appid, proton-version, env-vars, required-packages, compositor-notes (Wayland/Xorg), steam-flatpak caveat, controller-profile, and a short test checklist (what to look for to know it worked). Keep it terse, copy-pasteable, and versioned. Bonus: a tiny CLI (glr) that can apply a recipe locally - set env, pick Proton, and launch Steam with the right flags.

Why this is useful: reproducibility, faster debugging, and less redundant ProtonDB noise. It also lets us measure what actually helps across hardware. Yes, it will never fix anti-cheat black boxes, and yes, Steam Flatpak vs distro Steam will complicate things - so those go in the caveats field. We keep recipes small and honest: “works for me on Arch + NVIDIA 535 + Xorg”.

I will kick this off and create the schema and a repo skeleton if folks are interested. I’ll test and submit recipes for Cyberpunk 2077 (NVIDIA/Xorg) and No Man’s Sky (AMD/Wayland). Who wants to help? Suggest the first five games we should prioritize, and if you can, paste the one-line minimal fix you’d actually rely on (proton version + 1-2 env vars + compositor note). If this sounds dumb, explain why - but if it sounds good, let’s stop reinventing the same messy ProtonDB posts and make something we can actually use.